4 ms·

I've tried using Ardour, but I've never been able to get it to work with my USB Snowball mic. It starts with audio out, but once I configure my mic, it's input

I've tried using Ardour, but I've never been able to get it to work with my USB Snowball mic. It starts with audio out, but once I configure my mic, it's input only and I have to restart the program to hear anything I've done. No other program I've used has ever behaved like this. I'm sure it has terrific features, but it'd be great if they could nail the simple out-of-the-box configuration.

eropple 8y ago
If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. Ardour works fine with an Audio Technica AT2100 USB (I tried it and can verify that it uses the standard USB host drivers without complaint) for both I/O and works out-of-the-box with most of my audio interfaces and an XLR mic.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. My 2¢: Based on my experience with podcasters, I wouldn't recommend a Snowball for beginners doing spoken-word recordings. This is a "worse is better" scenario where a cheap dynamic will give you better out-of-the-box results than a condenser mic like the Snowball, in part because it forces speakers to get closer to the mic (increasing the ratio of signal to ambient noise), and in part because dynamics usually can't record anything over ~15 kHz (spoken word tops out around 8 kHz). A Snowball is fine for folks savvy enough to use an EQ to roll off everything over, say, 10 kHz during production.
  - eropple 8y ago
    I wouldn't recommend one either, to be clear. ;) My recommendation for a podcaster is either the AT2005USB or ATR2100USB, which are both decent-quality cheap dynamic microphones that have a USB sound card inside of them for easier real-time monitoring (but can both be used as XLR mics later if you expand). What I meant was that Blue is positioning it as that entry level podcast microphone. Which is, in its way, weird; it's a really strange microphone to try to work with and it just looks silly. I alternate between an sE V7 dynamic, a Blue Encore 200 "active dynamic", and an AT2035 at my desk for recordings. The Blue is something I'm just testing but the other two microphones are great for different things. (Anyone who hasn't checked out a sE V7 should; for my money it's the best thing in the "SM58 range" of dynamics, with a really clear sound for a dynamic. And the damned thing won't roll off your desk if you have it handheld...)
bitbang 8y ago
That's because the device is input only. By default Ardour uses the same device for capture and monitoring. The reason is that different audio devices have their own internal clocks, and using more than one devices introduces clock drift. You get around this be setting JACK to use the snowball device for capture only (and by doing so you are using its clock) and then attach whatever device you are using for monitoring as a JACK client using zita_j2a from the zita-ajbridge tools package.
- hellcow 8y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with setting up client/server/bridges just to plug in a microphone (which seems like a really common use-case!). FWIW I don't even need live monitoring where latency matters -- I just want to record, then stop recording, then play it back and edit it. I do know that programs like Adobe Audition on Windows offer that in a plug-and-play way.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  The only way to handle JACK I've found which wasn't PITA is by using Cadence and Catarina from KXStudio which are nice GUIs to manage JACK server. However, there is "but": because I use Debian, it was a lot of tinkering with apt-pinning and getting one very old lib (can't remember which one though) which is used in Ubuntu since 12.04 to build Ardour with.

eropple 8y ago

If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. Ardour works fine with an Audio Technica AT2100 USB (I tried it and can verify that it uses the standard USB host drivers without complaint) for both I/O and works out-of-the-box with most of my audio interfaces and an XLR mic.

CharlesW 8y ago
> If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. My 2¢: Based on my experience with podcasters, I wouldn't recommend a Snowball for beginners doing spoken-word recordings. This is a "worse is better" scenario where a cheap dynamic will give you better out-of-the-box results than a condenser mic like the Snowball, in part because it forces speakers to get closer to the mic (increasing the ratio of signal to ambient noise), and in part because dynamics usually can't record anything over ~15 kHz (spoken word tops out around 8 kHz). A Snowball is fine for folks savvy enough to use an EQ to roll off everything over, say, 10 kHz during production.
- eropple 8y ago
  I wouldn't recommend one either, to be clear. ;) My recommendation for a podcaster is either the AT2005USB or ATR2100USB, which are both decent-quality cheap dynamic microphones that have a USB sound card inside of them for easier real-time monitoring (but can both be used as XLR mics later if you expand). What I meant was that Blue is positioning it as that entry level podcast microphone. Which is, in its way, weird; it's a really strange microphone to try to work with and it just looks silly. I alternate between an sE V7 dynamic, a Blue Encore 200 "active dynamic", and an AT2035 at my desk for recordings. The Blue is something I'm just testing but the other two microphones are great for different things. (Anyone who hasn't checked out a sE V7 should; for my money it's the best thing in the "SM58 range" of dynamics, with a really clear sound for a dynamic. And the damned thing won't roll off your desk if you have it handheld...)

bitbang 8y ago

That's because the device is input only. By default Ardour uses the same device for capture and monitoring. The reason is that different audio devices have their own internal clocks, and using more than one devices introduces clock drift. You get around this be setting JACK to use the snowball device for capture only (and by doing so you are using its clock) and then attach whatever device you are using for monitoring as a JACK client using zita_j2a from the zita-ajbridge tools package.

hellcow 8y ago
That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with setting up client/server/bridges just to plug in a microphone (which seems like a really common use-case!). FWIW I don't even need live monitoring where latency matters -- I just want to record, then stop recording, then play it back and edit it. I do know that programs like Adobe Audition on Windows offer that in a plug-and-play way.
chupasaurus 8y ago
The only way to handle JACK I've found which wasn't PITA is by using Cadence and Catarina from KXStudio which are nice GUIs to manage JACK server. However, there is "but": because I use Debian, it was a lot of tinkering with apt-pinning and getting one very old lib (can't remember which one though) which is used in Ubuntu since 12.04 to build Ardour with.